BOLD explores... EdTech for children

Hello, my name is Natalia Kucirkova, I work as professor in early childhood development at the University of Stavanger in Norway, and I am specifically interested in innovative ways of supporting children’s learning. And that includes the interest in educational technologies or EdTech.

What excites me about EdTech for young children is its potential to support learning. By that I mean foundational learning skills like literacy and numeracy, but also social emotional learning, creativity. Well designed technology can really add value to children’s learning, and that’s a great potential of it.

What worries me about EdTech and young children is when EdTech is deployed uncritically. So, when schools or governments jump on the bandwagon of the latest and shiny technology without thinking about its added value for learning in the specific context. And what is also of concern is design of EdTech that misaligns with the principles of the science of learning, of how learning happens, and that, essentially keeps children as long as possible on the screen rather than supports their learning as much as possible. So, that’s a worry.

Features that make EdTech good for children’s learning, would be features where the child can grow with the technology. So the content is being adapted to the child’s progress over time and to their needs and preferences. So there’s some personalisation happening. And at the same time, the content would be of a good quality if the design is, not only growing with the child, but it’s also expanding the child’s horizons. So, introducing elements that are misaligned with what the child might expect or what they are familiar with, those are the aspects that introduce surprise, that introduce new content areas to the child’s thinking and, that expand the learner’s horizon. And that kind of combination of personalisation and pluralisation or if you like, adaptation and diversity is sort of the optimal design that we would be looking for in terms of its learning potential.

In terms of features that are bad for children’s learning, and in fact, both of the good, EdTech features and the bad features have been quite extensively researched, and there’s a lot of literature on them. Because it kind of depends on how you define learning and, you know, how you measure it. So if you take a specific theory like, Multimedia Learning Theory by Richard Mayer, there are some principles that have been extensively tested by him and colleagues in his lab and that show some of the learning principles that if applied, enhance learning. But if they are not, in the design, then you see the opposite effect.

So as an example, take the multimedia learning principle, where essentially the display of content is presented both in pictures and words and through this combination you have better learning because you get the presentation in two different modalities that expand each other. Or another example is the contiguity principle, where it’s about both the spatial and temporal contiguity. So making sure that when you have content presented on the screen, and you have two pieces of information, that they are both spatially, close to each other. so, you don’t have the text there and the image here, but that they are close together. And, you present that information quite quick in succession. So there is no long delay in how the information is presented so that it can be retained by learner and absorbed in their memory.

The advice I would give to caregivers would be to be intentional about the use of the technology they present to their child and to be discerned about their choices they make when they download specific apps for children. Especially if they want to support learning with the technology, then it’s important to pay attention to quality and the specific products that children engage with. So there are I think 500,000 apps on the App Store so, that are being labelled as educational. So, you know, knowing what to look for and making sure that they base their decisions on some verified quality criteria, provided by various independent organisations, whether it’s Common Sense Media, EduEvidence.org or some of the certification providers for EdTech. They make sure that there is some independent evidence of the actual value, learning value of this EdTech tool. So, important that caregivers are aware of those and use them to inform their choices.

The advice I would give to educators would be around the quality aspect of EdTech. So, ensuring that they check what they download for classroom use before children use it. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of junk out there. So, making sure that you use a high quality tool that enhances pedagogy rather than diminishes it is very important. The change I would love to see in the EdTech industry is around partnerships. So, more community led and less industry led EdTech is something that I’ve been advocating for, ensuring that we bring together developers of EdTech together with researchers, learning scientists, together with the industry, making sure that user voices, whether it’s children’s voices or teachers’ voices, are really an active ingredient of how technologies are being produced and scaled. And also the investors and funders that they are part of the discussions that EdTech organisations have with researchers, so that there is a good alignment between what the science says and what the industry needs for scaling and growth. That is something that I would love to see more of in the EdTech space.